Smart home & Energy Savings

It was an afternoon of sharing and insights from the Principals of LEDS C4, a Spanish lighting specialist, into how lightings has evolved from merely providing illumination in the past to now creating a better living experience through smart home controls and energy saving management for commercial setups. 

For residential users, the possibilities of controlling your lights with your mobile or smart devices is not a new concept to most of us. However, do you understand what are the purposes of doing so? Firstly, lighting moods play a part in how we react to scenarios. For example, when we want to relax, we uses warm and dim lights. When we want to work or clean the house, we have brighter lights. With a smart home application, we can set these scenes into a one touch button. We can even set a timer for certain scenes, such as in the evening, or during the day. We can have sensors to determine if it is too dark and we should turn on the lights, or even if there is nobody in the room and we should off the lights to save energy (and our electrical bill)!

Likewise for a commercial application, it is even more important for energy saving. There can be sensors to determine the occupancy of that particular sport, hence whether the light should be on or off/dimmed. There can be other sensors to track movements and heat. These sensors provide datas to a remote management application. Users can learn from these datas to determine, for example, if this particular walkway in a shopping mall is attracting crowded or more popular then other areas. Most of these sensors can provide useful datas to assist in marketing and strategic planning for businesses, or at the very least, helps to provide a better management of their business and resources. 

The specialists from LEDS C4 gave us a very good introduction to the capabilities of their products and how they can assist us in developing a good lighting and energy saving plan for our next project. Til then, lets embrace how technology and smart lighting can improve our life and experiences!